The Best American Humorous Short Stories eBook

The door closed, and he was gone. But as Prue
put her arm in mine and we went upstairs together,
she whispered in my ear:

“How glad I am that you don’t wear spectacles.”

MY DOUBLE; AND HOW HE UNDID ME

By Edward Everett Hale (1822-1909)

[From The Atlantic Monthly, September, 1859.
Republished in the volume, The Man Without a Country,
and Other Tales (1868), by Edward Everett Hale
(Little, Brown & Co.).]

It is not often that I trouble the readers of The
Atlantic Monthly. I should not trouble them
now, but for the importunities of my wife, who “feels
to insist” that a duty to society is unfulfilled,
till I have told why I had to have a double, and how
he undid me. She is sure, she says, that intelligent
persons cannot understand that pressure upon public
servants which alone drives any man into the employment
of a double. And while I fear she thinks, at the
bottom of her heart, that my fortunes will never be
re-made, she has a faint hope, that, as another Rasselas,
I may teach a lesson to future publics, from which
they may profit, though we die. Owing to the
behavior of my double, or, if you please, to that public
pressure which compelled me to employ him, I have
plenty of leisure to write this communication.

I am, or rather was, a minister, of the Sandemanian
connection. I was settled in the active, wide-awake
town of Naguadavick, on one of the finest water-powers
in Maine. We used to call it a Western town in
the heart of the civilization of New England.
A charming place it was and is. A spirited, brave
young parish had I; and it seemed as if we might have
all “the joy of eventful living” to our
hearts’ content.

Alas! how little we knew on the day of my ordination,
and in those halcyon moments of our first housekeeping!
To be the confidential friend in a hundred families
in the town—­cutting the social trifle,
as my friend Haliburton says, “from the top of
the whipped-syllabub to the bottom of the sponge-cake,
which is the foundation”—­to keep
abreast of the thought of the age in one’s study,
and to do one’s best on Sunday to interweave
that thought with the active life of an active town,
and to inspirit both and make both infinite by glimpses
of the Eternal Glory, seemed such an exquisite forelook
into one’s life! Enough to do, and all
so real and so grand! If this vision could only
have lasted.

The truth is, that this vision was not in itself a
delusion, nor, indeed, half bright enough. If
one could only have been left to do his own business,
the vision would have accomplished itself and brought
out new paraheliacal visions, each as bright as the
original. The misery was and is, as we found
out, I and Polly, before long, that, besides the vision,
and besides the usual human and finite failures in
life (such as breaking the old pitcher that came over
in the Mayflower, and putting into the fire the alpenstock